Least Likely to Marry a Duke (Liberated Ladies)

‘Are you ready to go back to your aunt?’ Will rose from the deep wing chair beside the fireplace.

‘Will. You made me jump, I thought you had gone. I will just go and find a cab. I am so glad you have dealt with Thomas... Goodbye.’

He caught her to him as she tried to reach the door, held her away from his chest at arm’s length. ‘Verity, you are positively gibbering. What is the matter?’

‘Nothing. I really must go. Oh, and I must take the pistol with me. I borrowed it without asking.’

‘I doubt your uncle is going to fight any duels today. It can wait. Verity, I heard you, very clearly, say you loved me. Why are you running away?’

‘Because that is neither here nor there,’ she told his neckcloth firmly. ‘I mean, I like you very well and I am quite used to your being perfect in every way and I can even forgive you being a duke, but you have kindly said you will deal with any gossip in the clubs and all the influential matrons accept me and Thomas cannot spread his poison about either of us now. So I can go home and next time I come to London it will all be forgotten.’

‘Do you not want to marry me, Verity?’ Will asked.

‘You don’t love me and I would be a most unsuitable duchess, so I would be unhappy and you would be, too.’

‘Do you think you could bear to stop talking to my top waistcoat button and look at me?’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because if I look at you I want to kiss you and that would not help in the slightest.’ If he did not let her go, she was going to weep and that would be even less helpful, she thought shakily.

‘But it would cheer me up considerably,’ Will said. He switched his hold from her arms to her waist, picked her up, deposited her on the edge of the table in a swirl of Mr Fitcham’s papers and bent to kiss her.

Verity kissed him back, curled her arms around him and held him to her as, with lips and tongue, he proceeded to reduce her to helpless longing. Something crackled beneath her, a long-fingered hand came to cradle the back of her head and Verity blinked her eyes open to find herself staring up at the ceiling and Will lying beside her on the table.

‘Will, we can’t!’

‘I can make love to my wife-to-be anywhere,’ he said. ‘Now, how does this charming garment unfasten?’

She was beyond coherent reply—even if she had been able to remember how the gown did up. Will had worked it out, she realised, as his hand slid, warm and gentle, over her breast. She arched into his palm as he caressed the swell of flesh above the edge of her corset with one hand and the other slid up under her skirts, over the edge of her garter, on to the bare skin.

This was Will and she loved him and she wanted him and her whole body was screaming for him as his thumb found her nipple and his fingers caressed over intimate folds that she could feel were already wet for him.

He desired her, she had known that from their first kiss, could tell it now from the rasp of his breathing and the hard thrust of his body against her thigh. ‘Verity. You will be mine. Not here, not now, but soon.’ One finger found a point of aching sensitivity, moved and she cried out at the exquisite pleasure of it.

So good. Seducing me as though he knows my body inside and out... Seducing...

Verity twisted away, found the edge of the table and staggered to her feet. ‘No. Will, you are trying to seduce me into doing what you think is right and I will not, because I know it would be wrong.’ She was weeping now, at last, feeling the moisture slipping down her face. She pulled up the neckline of her walking dress—goodness knew where her pelisse had gone—shook out her skirts, saw her reticule and grabbed for it.

‘You might want me, but you do not need me and you have said yourself, over and over, that I would be a disaster of a duchess. Do you think I want to be tied to a man who does not love me? Who married me because he felt he had to and because he would quite like to get me into bed? If I did not love you, it would be bad enough, but now, it would break my heart.’

He stood stock-still, his clothing disordered, his hair across his brow, as dishevelled as he had been on the island where she had come to know him, perhaps where she had learned to love him. For once he seemed to be lost for words. Verity took her chance and ran, out of the door, down the hall, dodging between two burly men with straw hats and tarred pigtails who were ordering the footman to fetch his master’s trunk, out of the front door and into the street. And there, just rounding the corner, was a hackney carriage.

* * *

What had just happened? Other than him losing his mind and his self-control and attempting to make love to Verity on a vicarage table and then standing like a lightning-struck tree when he should have been reassuring her. From the window Will saw Verity scramble into a hackney and drive off.

She loved him, she had said so, not only to Harrington, but again just now. He loved her and that was what she wanted, so why... Oh, hell. He hadn’t told her, had he? He had demanded that she marry him, attempted to ravish her in conditions of extreme discomfort with strange men just the other side of an unlocked door, but he had not said those three simple words. Verity had many talents, but mind reading was not one of them, he told himself ruefully.

‘Your Grace?’ Fitcham stood just inside the door staring from the floor, where his paperwork was strewn, to his dishevelled employer and back again.

‘Carry on, Fitcham,’ Will said, with a sweep of his hand to encompass papers, errant vicars and hard-jawed sailors. He tugged his neckcloth into some semblance of order, scooped up his hat from the hall table and strode out of the house. Simply turning up on Lady Fairlie’s doorstep with declarations of undying love was not going to convince Verity, he knew her well enough for that. She would assume that he was telling her he loved her because he was determined to do the right thing and marry her.

Will stopped dead in the middle of the pavement. A stout woman with a small dog on a leash swerved round him with a loud comment about young bucks with no manners. He lifted his hat automatically and she sniffed and walked on.

Verity believed that the most important thing in his life was being the perfect duke but, somehow, he had to convince her that she was what mattered most to him, perfection be damned. He saw a hackney and hailed it. ‘Grosvenor Square.’ As he settled back against the worn old squabs without a care for his coat he told himself that Verity would not simply run for home. Her aunt had accepted invitations for them over the next few days, including one to a Drawing Room at St James’s Palace. Verity would not want to let Lady Fairlie down, he had to believe that.